| Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder | |
|---|---|
Brideshead Revisited, 1945 first UK edition |
|
| Author(s) | Evelyn Waugh |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chapman and Hall |
| Publication date | 1945 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | Put Out More Flags (1942) |
| Followed by | Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947) |
Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself".[1] This is achieved by an examination of the Roman Catholic aristocratic Marchmain family, as seen by the narrator, Charles Ryder.
In the United States, Brideshead Revisited was the Book of the Month Club selection for January 1946.[2] In 2005, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.[3] In various letters, Waugh himself refers to the novel a number of times as his magnum opus; however, in 1950 he wrote to Graham Greene saying "I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled." In Waugh's preface to the 1959 revised edition of Brideshead the author explains the circumstances in which the novel was written, in the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 following a minor parachute accident. He is mildly disparaging of the novel, saying; "It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful."
Brideshead Revisited was brought to the screen in 1981 in the ITV drama serialisation, produced by Granada Television. A film adaptation of the book was released in July 2008.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Brideshead Revisited #80 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Contents |
1923: Protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, a student at Hertford College, Oxford, is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the aristocratic Lord Marchmain and an undergraduate at Christ Church. Sebastian introduces Charles to his eccentric and aesthetic friends, including the haughty and homosexual Anthony Blanche. Sebastian also takes Charles to his family's palatial home, Brideshead, in Wiltshire[4] where Charles later meets the rest of Sebastian's family, including his sister Julia.
During the long vacation, Charles returns home to London, where he lives with his widowed father. The conversations there between Charles and his father Edward Ryder provide some of the best-known comic scenes in the novel. Charles is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury, and Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the vacation together.
Sebastian's family are Roman Catholics, which influences the Marchmains' lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity to be "without substance or merit". Lord Marchmain had converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in order to marry his wife, but he later abandoned both his marriage and his new religion and moved to Venice in Italy. Left alone, Lady Marchmain focuses even more on her faith, which is also enthusiastically espoused by her eldest son, Lord Brideshead ("Bridey"), and by her youngest daughter, Cordelia. Sebastian, a troubled young man, descends into alcoholism, drifting away from the family over a two-year period. He flees to Morocco, where his drinking ruins his health. He eventually finds some solace as an under-porter and object of charity at a Tunisian monastery.
Sebastian's drifting leads to Charles's own estrangement from the Marchmains. Charles marries and fathers two children, but he becomes cold towards his wife and she is unfaithful to him, and he eventually forms a relationship with Sebastian's younger sister Julia. Julia has married but separated from the rich but unsophisticated Canadian business man, Rex Mottram. This marriage caused great sorrow to her mother, because Rex, though initially planning to convert to Roman Catholicism, turns out to have divorced a previous wife in Canada, and that so he and Julia ended up marrying in the Church of England.
Charles and Julia plan to divorce their respective spouses so that they can marry each other. On the eve of the Second World War, the aging Lord Marchmain, terminally ill, returns to Brideshead to die in his ancestral home. Appalled by the marriage of his eldest son, Brideshead, he names Julia heir to the estate, which prospectively offers Charles marital ownership of the house. However, Lord Marchmain's return to the faith on his deathbed changes the situation: Julia decides that she cannot enter a sinful marriage with Charles, who has also been moved by Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacraments.
The plot concludes in the early spring of 1943 (or possibly 1944 – the date is disputed).[5] Charles is "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless". He has become an army officer after establishing a career as an architectural artist, and finds himself unexpectedly billeted at Brideshead, which has been taken into military use. He finds the house damaged by the army, but the private chapel, closed after Lady Marchmain's death in 1926, has been reopened for the soldiers' worship. It occurs to him that the efforts of the builders - and, by extension, God's efforts - were not in vain, although their purposes may have appeared, for a time, to have been frustrated.[6]
Roman Catholicism becomes a significant theme of the book. Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Roman Catholicism and the book is considered to be an attempt to express the Roman Catholic faith in secular literary form. Waugh wrote to his literary agent A. D. Peters, "I hope the last conversation with Cordelia gives the theological clue. The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won't recognise it." Considering his readership, who were generally urbane and cosmopolitan, a sentimental or a didactic approach would not have worked. Sentimentalism would have cheapened the story while didacticism would have repelled a secular audience through excessive sermonising.
Instead, the book brings the reader, through the narration of the initially agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the severely flawed but deeply Roman-Catholic Marchmain family. While many novels of the same era portray Roman Catholics as the flatfooted people put on the spot by brilliant non-believers, Brideshead Revisited turns the table on the agnostic Charles Ryder (and presumably the reader as well) and scrutinises his secular values, which are tacitly portrayed as falling short of the deeper humanity and spirituality of the Catholic faith.
The Catholic themes of divine grace and reconciliation are pervasive in the book. Most of the major characters undergo a conversion in some way or another. Lord Marchmain, a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, who lived as an adulterer, is reconciled with the Church on his deathbed. Julia, who entered a marriage with Rex that is invalid in the eyes of the Roman Church, and is involved in an extramarital affair with Charles, comes to feel this relationship is immoral and decides to separate from Charles in spite of her great attachment to him. Sebastian, the charming and flamboyant alcoholic, ends up in service to a monastery while struggling against his alcoholism. Even Cordelia has some sort of conversion: from being the "worst" behaved schoolgirl her headmistress has ever seen, to serving in the hospital bunks of the Spanish Civil War.
Most significant is Charles's apparent conversion, which is expressed very subtly at the end of the book, set more than 20 years after his first meeting Sebastian. Charles kneels down in front of the tabernacle of the Brideshead chapel and says a prayer, "an ancient, newly learned form of words" — implying recent instruction in the catechism. Waugh speaks of his belief in grace in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon: "I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It's there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there's a particular time — sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed — when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in."
Waugh uses a quotation from a short story by G. K. Chesterton to illustrate the nature of Grace. Cordelia, in conversation with Charles Ryder, quotes a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet": "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."[7] This quotation provides the foundation for Waugh's Roman Catholic treatment of the interplay of free will and grace in the moment of conversion. Aside from grace and reconciliation, other catholic themes in the book are the Communion of Saints, faith and vocation.
The same themes were criticised by Waugh's contemporaries. Henry Green, a fellow novelist, wrote to Waugh, "The end was not for me. As you can imagine my heart was in my mouth all through the deathbed scene, hoping against hope that the old man would not give way, that is, take the course he eventually did." And Edmund Wilson, who had praised Waugh as the hope of the English novel, wrote "The last scenes are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not — painful to say — meant quite seriously." A reviewer of the book at the time of its publication regarded it as an apologia of Roman Catholicism.
The Flyte family is widely found to symbolize the English nobility. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age," and, referring to the deaths of Lady Marchmain's brothers in the Great War, "these men must die to make a world for Hooper ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures."
According to Martin Amis, the book "squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly."[8]
The precise nature of Charles and Sebastian's relationship remains a topic of debate; whether they are simply close friends or if Waugh hints at a sexual relationship between the two is not definitive.[9] Given that much of the first half of the novel focuses on the initial encounter, blossoming friendship and eventual estrangement of these central characters, this issue continues to pique the curiosity of readers.
Readers who interpret the relationship as overtly homosexual quote such lines as the fact that Charles had been "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, and his finding "that low door in the wall ... which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden" — an image that some interpret as a Freudian metaphor for homosexual sex, though it recurs when Charles is expelled from Brideshead by Lady Marchmain, suggesting it refers more generally to the glamorous world Sebastian represents: "a door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford." It may also be an homage to Lewis Carroll and his work Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice travels to Wonderland through a rabbit hole and the inspiration for this lay in there being a low door in the wall to the garden of the Dean of Christ Church. That is where the real life inspiration of Alice (Alice Pleasance Liddell, the dean's daughter) used to play with her sisters and sometimes were entertained by Carroll. However, the line "our naughtiness [was] high on the catalogue of grave sins" is also a suggestion of homosexual sex, which is a mortal sin in Roman Catholic dogma, though it is worth noting that so are drunkenness and gluttony, which Charles and Sebastian certainly indulge in. Reference is made at one point to Charles impatiently awaiting Sebastian's letters in the manner of one who is love-smitten. It is also suggested in the book that one of the reasons why Charles is later in love with Julia is because of the similarity between her and Sebastian. Indeed, when asked by Julia if he loved Sebastian, Charles replies, "Oh yes! He was the forerunner".
Another interpretation is that Charles and Sebastian had a passionate yet platonic relationship, an immature albeit strongly felt attachment that prefigures future heterosexual relationships. Waugh himself said that "Charles's romantic affection for Sebastian is part due to the glitter of the new world Sebastian represents, part to the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character, and part a foreshadowing of the love for Julia which is to be the consuming passion of his mature years." In the book Cara, Lord Marchmain's mistress, says to Charles that his relationship with Sebastian forms part of a process of emotional development typical to "the English and the Germans".
"I got her out in the end, he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I heard in those words a challenge to myself."[13]
A fragment about the young Charles Ryder entitled Charles Ryder's Schooldays was found after Waugh's death, and is available in collections of Waugh's short works.
Brideshead Revisited has been dramatised for Radio 4 in four one-hour episodes and repeated on BBC7.
In scene 2 of Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, one character refers to another character who attends Oxford as "Brideshead Regurgitated." Et in Arcadia ego, the Latin phrase which is the title of the major section (Book One) of Brideshead Revisited, is also a central theme to Tom Stoppard's play. Stoppard's phrase may have been inspired by the 1980s BBC comedy series "Three of a Kind", starring Tracey Ullman, Lenny Henry and David Copperfield, which featured a recurring sketch entitled "Brideshead Regurgitated", with Henry in the role of Charles Ryder.
In the early 1980s, following the release of the television series, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (from 1983, Australian Broadcasting Corporation) produced a radio show called Brunswick Heads Revisited. Brunswick Heads is a coastal town in northern New South Wales. The series was a spoof, and made fun of the 'Englishness' of Brideshead and many amusing parallels could be drawn between the upper class characters from Brideshead and their opposite numbers from rural Australia.
Throughout episode 1 of the fifth season of the American TV show How I Met Your Mother, the protagonist considers approaching a girl at a bar, who can be seen to be reading Brideshead Revisited.
Paula Byrne's biography of Evelyn Waugh, titled Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, was published by HarperPress in the UK in August 2009 and HarperCollins New York in the USA in April 2010. An excerpt was published in the Sunday Times 9 August 2009 under the headline "Sex Scandal Behind 'Brideshead Revisited'". The book concerns Lord Beauchamp, who was the father of Waugh's friend Hugh Lygon. Its stated thesis is "that the exiled Lord Marchmain [a character in Brideshead Revisited] was a version of Boom [Lord Beauchamp] and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that the dissolute Sebastian Flyte was Hugh and other Lygon siblings matched other roles." The book, which Byrne describes in the preface as a "partial life," identifies other real-life bases for events and characters in Waugh's novel, though Byrne argues carefully against simple one-to-one correspondences, suggesting instead that Waugh combined people, places and events into composite inventions, subtle transmutations of life into fiction. An illustrated extract appeared in the April 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in advance of American publication.
|
||||||||||||||||||||